How badly affected are corporate lawyers by the economy?

[patent_law_hopeful]

Ignore my sn since I don't particularly care for patent law anymore:

I'm more interested in corporate law, or maybe health law, so I was wondering if I do choose the biglaw route, how hard is it to come by jobs nowadays with the current state of the job market? I don't particularly care that much about salaries, but are they affected greatly to the point at which the investment of law school is no longer a good idea?

Also, about health law, how stable is that field? Is this the area that deals with malpractice and such. And I guess, are the salaries in this field pretty good? I'm mostly interested in it because I wanted to be a doctor and thus working the health care field (although in obviously a much different way) is still appealing, but I was just curious as to whether the salaries in this field are generally decent. I'm not expecting big law salaries, but do pretty decent health attorneys make a very good living still?

thanks

[nealric]

I don't think there are any clear answers to your questions.

Some healthcare lawyers are in biglaw and get paid biglaw salaries. Others are at small firms or in-house and make a wide range of salaries. Corporate work is certainly down from where it was a few years ago, but it is by no means a dying field.

As far as whether the economy is too bad to make law school a good investment is all about your personal circumstances and your risk tolerance. Nobody knows how you will do in law school or what the economy will look like in a few years.

[LittleRussianPrincess, Esq.]

As you can tell, job security isn't exactly fabulous for corporate lawyers these days. You need not look farther than abovethelaw.com to see that corporate lawyers nation-wide are getting axed on a regular basis and in uncomfortably high numbers. Whether that will be the case by the time you would graduate law school is anyone's guess. Some experts predict a long-term downturn, while others say we are on the verge or a rebound. It's all speculation, in my opinion. Only time will tell. Right now, there's more security at overseas offices.

Healthcare law is usually involves the representation of clients in the healthcare industry (hospitals, etc.) and there's a compliance and a corporate aspect to it. If you're interested in doing plaintiff's side malpractice, you won't find much of it in biglaw.